Odyssey Dawn: a military operations in Libya thread.

again, i think the doubt can be assumed

PASSIVE VOICE

there is nothing wrong with the passive voice; anyway i assume doubt, yall pretty much sound like blowhards

i am in favor of people doing something about bad governments they live under. nobody's an angel or anything, but as a general deal, that's my thing, man

my list of problems up there aren't with the anti-qdf partisans -- whatever their strengths or weaknesses on somebody else's metric, it doesn't really matter to me morally, except to try to think about what's happening there clearly, if that makes sense. "reliability" is an odd word to be throwing around. will they get what they want? will life be better? i...dk, yet!

my comment was really directed stateside, where defenders of the president have been eager to chalk this up as a "win" for "us" or "obama", not really to speak of libya in itself but to stick it in the face of obama's domestic enemies. bit early for that.

Howard Dean and Tina Brown gave a weird interview on MSNBC with Jeremy Scahill the other day in which they praised the President's "performance" on purely political terms when they weren't applauding his use of drones, proxies, and the CIA as opposed to "putting boots on the ground." I was stupefied.

yeah I don't have any use for considering this in terms of domestic politics

xp

don't think of the rebels as proxies personally

im sure some of them are awful and could turn libya into some kind of military dictatorship, but proxies?

I don't think of "the rebels" as a monolith personally.

but some of them are proxie

s

HM where/who is this "proxy" stuff coming from? i don't think anyone here is arguing as much. plenty of outside help, sure, but...

yall pretty much sound like blowhards

― some jock-bully out to take down the hipsters (history mayne), Thursday, August 25, 2011 4:34 PM (17 minutes ago)

pot, kettle, etc. enjoy your armchair general realpolitik cynicism.

also:

when libya does turn into a fullblown hellhole

can I borrow your crystal ball, I need to check what your SB numbers will be in a couple of days.

when they weren't applauding his use of drones, proxies, and the CIA as opposed to "putting boots on the ground." I was stupefied.

― a 'catch-all', almost humorous, 'Jeez' quality (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, August 26, 2011 12:42 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark

i just hadn't heard there were proxies for US ground forces before

wait, *my* cynicism? im pretty sure im being the optimist in this argument

ok well i don't know what exactly was said in that TV spot, nor do i know exactly what alfred means, but, other NATO and gulf special forces troops could count as "proxies" for obama's interests, if you squint

re "proxies": We've (as in the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA, NSA, and the other members of the alphabet soup) paid locals in Egypt, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Iraq to fight, capture, and torture for years.

Here's some evidence: http://www.thenation.com/article/161936/cias-secret-sites-somalia

Do you think there's a difference in principle between a US-supported rebellion and a proxy war?

oh ok -- that doesn't directly relate to libya. torture is bad imo.
there is less triumphalism here.

xpost

yes. but i don't think US involvement is unproblematic.

you guys are misusing the term proxy war here

lol bbc

Ursula, emails: Muammar (Gaddafi) does not have palaces - quit the false propaganda. His throne is only in the hearts of the people! This so-called tyrant is in reality different from the fiction the media, controlled by world powers seeks to portray. The Jamahiriya is a democracy of all the people where Muammar sought to have the people rule themselves! They vote every year and several times per year, not for parties but for the people who represent them in manager positions for the Jamahiriyah or the people. Rats is a nice term for people who invite the Nato countries coalition to massacre their people and bomb the hell out of them over the past six months. In the heat, Nato forces not only kill en masse and terrorise the Libyans but they cut off electricity so food goes off both in warehouses and in homes! Muammar and the people of Libya will not surrender.

ok richard seymour i mean 'ursula'

Triumphalism is always tasteless and misjudged but the flipside to so is the determination on the part of some of those who opposed the intervention to see it all go bad. I've read predictions (itt and elsewhere) that the fall of Q will lead to (a) an Islamist takeover (b) a western puppet state (c) a military dictatorship or (d) civil war. These are all possible of course, but the aftermath of a long dictatorship is invariably messy and at least in this case there appears to have been a serious degree of planning and no powerful Karzai-like demagogue seeking to seize the reins. If the revolution had succeeded without NATO help would the same people be predicting disaster or would they be wishing the Libyans well? This is far from over, and I'm in no position to say the more grisly scenarios won't unfold, but it would be nice to give the Libyan people a bit of credit as opposed to seeing them as a sinister and/or incompetent bunch of extremists and western stooges.

"the Libyan people"

it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. libya has exactly zero experience with the cut and thrust of national democracy. its politics has been defined totally and completely by quetzalcoatal for the last what, 40 years, and before that it was a colony. and before that, a region of scattered tribes. so there is this tremendous opportunity, but also a big possibility of just slipping into whatever the national default mode of informal tribal governance is i.e. bribes, tributes, feudal stuff, with a veneer of elections over the top of it. which wouldn't be the end of the world, of course. but it's amazing to me how strong these cultural modes can be. the soviet union had one of the world's most radical systems of government ever, and after 80 years threw the whole thing overboard in favor of the plain, naked corruption they'd had before. it's as if there really is such a thing as a continuous national character, in some places at least. so i guess my question is, what is libya's?

monarchy between Q and colony

one thing i haven't seen any discussion of is the extent to which there's a post-spring pan-arabism in operation (answer may be none, but the western triumphalists and west-as-monovillain commentators are pretty much parochially as one in not speaking arabic or having any evolving sense of the actually existing generational semi-post-islamist at work here, so i don;t see any very good reason to trust their conflicting commentaries) (which is not to argue that it's at all the most significant element in the dynamic yet: the impression i get with libya is that we're so in the dark about what happened off-camera that no one's guesses are defensible at this stage)

british jets apprently bombing gaddafi's compound right now

which compound? i thought it was full of looting rebels?

in sirte

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14677754

whoops never mind, was last night and they're just announcing it now

i suspect they hoped to gettim and be announcing THAT right now, instead they're saying "this is not and never was about actually killing gaddafi, perish the thought"

xp to mark s. This is why I trust Juan Cole more than any other commentators. He actually knows the arab world. Many others - on both sides, as you say - can only see Libya through western eyes. My experience on places like the Guardian comment threads is that the Libyans and other arabs who comment are overwhelmingly in favour of what has happened. Of course they're not the only voices, but when Seumas Milne says things like a messy transition will be "no liberation at all" I want to say: try asking someone who's lived their whole lives under a dictator.

I think the west-as-monovillain camp has more of a case when it comes to the reconstruction. I don't want to see the shock doctrine in action, but let's wait and see before burying the revolution in advance. Considering most of these people were predicting a disastrous end to the fighting - and haven't once conceded they called it wrong - I don't have much faith in their crystal balls. Cole's point about Iraq and Iran backing Assad for internal reasons to do with Shi'ites vs Sunni shows how complicated responses to the arab spring are even within the arab world. I'm amazed anyone feels equipped to make confident predictions at this stage.

george galloway popped up on the radio this morning claiming that gaddafi is actually jewish and a lot of the rebel chants that the_media aren't translating are anti-semitic slurs. now aside from the fact that concerns over arab anti-semitism aren't something that i'd have thought keep galloway up at night, is he right? a quick google seems to only produce sites with headlines like is gaddafi a rothschild? so i'm wondering if someone needs to tell young george not to believe everything he reads on the internet

juan cole is overrated

(i'm sorry but)

Thanks for your insight.

you're welcome. i have met juan cole personally and i have family/friends who have worked with him. personality wise he is sort of a typical "i am telling truth to power" blowhard.

I can believe that but I'm looking for people who know what they're talking about vis a vis the arab spring. If you can point me in the direction of others then great.

try al jazeera english

Sure, I've been using that since Egypt kicked off at the start of the year.

that's cool. there are lots of good links on the liveblogs and twitter feeds. just saying that if i was pointing you toward info about the arab spring, i wouldn't point in the direction of the university of michigan.

Ha, fair point. He's not my only source.

cole is an american version of hitchens in that he can't help but inject his outsized ego into the topic. at the end of the day, you learn as much or more about hitchens as you do about the middle east.

i mean, sympomatic of juan cole: his wikipedia entry, which lists him as a "kahlil gibran expert" is longer than kahlil gibran's wikipedia entry.

I think Cole's a bit more humble than Hitchens, but that's not saying much. Obviously if one has time, it's best to read a variety of sources. Speaking of which, on the current transition and comparisons to Iraq:

From Reuters:

For months a handful of Western advisers has worked with the NTC, based in the eastern city of Benghazi, on plans for a power transition that would avoid the disasters of Iraq.

Intentions are one thing, implementation another.

From Washington Post:
Among the first waves of rebels to storm Tripoli this week was a small team whose members carried smartphones along with their weapons. Under a well-rehearsed plan, they blasted Arabic text messages that would appear on tens of thousands of cellphones throughout the city.

“Don’t destroy public buildings,” one read. “These are for the future of Libya.”

Libyan novelist Hisham Matar's POV

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/26/libya-revolution-hisham-matar-edinburgh?CMP=twt_fd

this is over a month old but i don't think its being talked about at all?

http://humanrightsinvestigations.org/2011/07/17/lynching-in-benghazi/

The treatment of black Africans is a horrible element of all this - I have seen it mentioned but not much, that's true - but what's with the final paragraph?

We ask our readers to contact news organisations to demand they cover this story and to contact politicians to ensure that the rebels, amongst whom are clearly a significant faction equivalent to Al Qaeda /the Ku Klux Klan, are not supported in taking control of any further population centres.

Doesn't seem like an impartial human rights group to me. Other stories on that site include one claiming that not buying oil from Syria will amount to infanticide: "The move has been supported by Human Rights Watch, who seem to have forgotten the lessons of the Iraqi sanctions, or perhaps are so wedded to US foreign policy that they don’t care." Weirdly they don't seem to care at all about the human rights of demonstrators murdered by Assad.

Obviously there is a horrifying and dangerous and racist propaganda and violence campaign against sub-saharans happening as part of this. Otherizing the enemy is a sad and awful and predictable part of a war.

That said, I do find it interesting that HRI came into existence on 4/21, a month after Odyssey Dawn started. HRI has reported almost exclusively on Libya, and has fielded accusations of being Gaddhafi-funded. Things that make me go hmm, to say the least.

Interesting piece from a pro-intervention Marxist:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/27/1010769/-Who-really-beat-Qaddafi?via=blog_511082

Gist: "Much of the anti-war movement, short on analysis and driven by reflex, came out opposed to NATO. They took a counter-revolutionary stand with regards to the Libyan revolution."

cf hitch

"your analysis is lacking" was always my fave marxist-to-marxist zing

I love Marxist v Marxist beef. I like "counter-revolutionary" as an unashamedly old school put-down.